Rick Moody - The Diviners

Alpine, Texas. She’s come here to find that it’s among the last places in the country unexploited by the film business, an exploitation she now means to bring about with a vengeance. She means to line up a bunch of trailers, longer than the longest freight train, and she means to assemble a bunch of union guys who will descend on the local bars by the dozens, and she means to send extras in Mongolian outfits into this rangeland, and these Mongolians will be stabbing at one another, with the fight choreographer yelling from just offscreen. There will be helicopters hovering over all of the action, equipped with cameras and massive lenses.

Her itinerary: first, the Gila National Monument. From there, she moved south and east. Vanessa liked it better in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and she liked it there for one reason. The Low Rider. Well, there was also the possibility of Alamogordo. Yes, Vanessa favored the idea that a Geiger counter might pick up echoes of long-ago blasts. But what Alamogordo looked like was like everything else. On the second day, they turned south toward Carlsbad. Why is it, at these caverns, that there’s always a tour guide who has to point his flashlight at a stalagmite and compare it to an elephant? No way. Cutting short Carlsbad, they decided to head east toward the Big Bend. It was a long drive, and they let themselves stop at whatever picturesque roadside beguiled.

Then, while driving east into the dawn, in a Pontiac Grand Am in teal, Vanessa managed to stumble on this place, scarcely of note on any map, except for its state university. Alpine, TX. She had no reason to know that she’d long been yearning for such a place, a place so slow and backward and lost. Maybe the whole month of November had been bringing her near to Alpine. With each bit of bad news in the prior weeks, she had drawn closer. Fuck Dallas and its oil culture; fuck Houston and its art museums. Out here was a plateau the size of Rhode Island with only seven thousand legal inhabitants, a few starveling longhorn steer, some horses, and antelope. Heartbroken towns full of tumbleweed and excessively large pickups with tinted windows.

Her room at the Javalina Motor Court smells like a swimming pool, and the hot water isn’t hot, and Vanessa’s stomach is knotted from the taco she ate in town, and there are a half dozen distressing messages on her voice mail, not one of them from her mother, who she still expects will call. There are the frequent messages from the department of Missing Persons. Madison, meanwhile, claims to have found a good office rental in or near to the World Trade Center. Means of Production will be closer to Robert De Niro and the other classy addresses of Tribeca. But still. There’s no cell phone contact out here in Alpine, so there’s no point in trying to return the calls now at the inflated motel rate. If you drive up into the mountains, she was told by Jack from Brewster County Properties, you might be able to make contact with a satellite.

And speaking of space junk, Alpine is a known location for unidentified flying objects. So it is that Vanessa attempts to roust Allison Maiser, intern and location scout. They are going to drive into the hills to watch for UFOs. Jack knows the guy who knows where to go. It’s big business hereabouts. Vanessa saw a storefront that boasted trips for prime viewing. This sounds like something that could be worked into the script. Maybe dowsing, the skill passed down through the generations in The Diviners, was first learned from interstellar wayfarers. Maybe there should be UFOs or space aliens at the end of the story.

Allison’s door is beige and is peeling, and the room number has come loose, is dangling upside down, revealing an aqua paint coat underneath, from a cost-conscious period of motel administration when bright colors prevailed.

“Get up!” Vanessa pounds on the door. “I have an idea.”

Allison sticks her nose and homely eyeglasses into a narrow space between the door and its frame. In her hand, a dog-eared paperback that she picked up in Albuquerque, Louis L’Amour.

“Unidentified flying objects! When else do you think you’re going to get the chance!”

“I was reading —”

“Divining is some kind of genetic mutation, and maybe there are UFOs at the beginning and end of the story, and the dowsers are touched by the lights given off by the UFOs, and that’s how they develop the skill, and the mutation is passed down. Should I call Ranjeet? At the end of the story, the last dowser is conscripted into NASA.”

Vanessa explains how she saw the storefront advertising expeditions, and about the tip from Jack the Realtor. Allison Maiser could refuse, of course, because she’s Allison Maiser, but she ultimately gets a coat on, though she’s still wearing her pajama bottoms. It’s back into the Grand Am. Soon they have met up with their guide, Bo Fontaine, a one-time military man who has seemingly spent the last twenty years drinking too much and who has failed in this period of time to perfect the art of shaving without a mirror. For fifty dollars, Bo says, they get to go for a drive and hear his spiel, which is about a woman called Brenda Mae Millerton, who, in these very parts, just north of the town of Alpine, was taken up into a shining disk, probed, and released, during which adventure she learned, above all, that the aliens have been visiting the southwestern United States simply for the reason that the landing surfaces here are amenable to their craft. These aliens also visit the Nunavut Territory, and that’s why the Inuit drew those unusual drawings.

The aliens understand and are attracted to love, Bo continues, in his four-by-four, and therefore, “It’s pretty likely that they have a conception of Jesus. In the beginning was creation, and that means all of creation; it doesn’t just mean creation here, it means creation far and wide, creation scattered about in the night skies, creation amongst the galaxies that you see from that telescope. . what’s that. . the Hubble telescope. Creation means the creation of galaxies; it means those are real pictures coming from real galaxies, black holes, and such, which means He was there when the aliens were created, as He was always there. He’ll be there when we travel to the stars. Put it another way: The aliens are aspects of creation. The aliens are in His own image, just like we are.

“No need to fear the unidentified flying object because even if the pilots of that craft have three heads or eyes in the palms of their hands or whatnot, they know love, see what I’m saying?” Bo goes on without self-consciousness. His chatter is transitional: from the lights of Alpine to the blackness of the farm road that leads due east. Again and again, in the days of driving, Vanessa has found herself at night in a landscape that has more nothing in it than anywhere she’s ever been. Here it is again, producing a feeling both soothing and unsettling. The arresting nothingness of the back roads, jackrabbits hopping off the tarmac before their headlights. It could be mountains out in that darkness ahead and behind; it could be a stately sequence of ridges. It could be nothing.

They don’t know anything about Bo. They don’t know, really, that he’s not a rapist in training or a world-class serial killer. There must be more serial killers in the great state of Texas, because they execute so many of them. Vanessa knows how to kick a guy in the balls hard and she knows how to punch at the Adam’s apple of a man with a sharp jab so as to choke and incapacitate. She’d do either of these things before she’d let a sweaty redneck dishonor her or the intern.

In fact, if she needs to, she resolves that she will maneuver herself into a position where she can inflict bodily harm on Bo, after which she will tell Allison that she has been wanting to kiss her. Because ever since the night when they watched The Werewolves of Fairfield County together, the night when Vanessa found herself in bed with Allison the intern, who was definitely a top, there has been no consort between them. It should be, when women love women, that the male tendency toward callousness, toward the recoiling from intimate talk, sharing feelings, never rears its head. Women shouldn’t fuck and run. But once Allison had wrapped her arms around her, and inserted some things in her, and used her tongue on her, and told her that she was now Allison’s possession, until Vanessa was laughing because it was all so funny and so new, laughing until the moment when she started crying, once Allison had done all these things, it was as if she embarked on a campaign of neglecting Vanessa in the office. If not for serving as location scout, which Vanessa offered Allison in hopes that they would then share a hotel room, she would probably be as far away from Vanessa as she could get. It has been a little tense. Nevertheless, Vanessa will tell Allison that something has come over her, some feeling has come over Vanessa out here in the desert, in the limitless night. She will tell Allison that she thinks that this life is made for more than work and pizza and television. She wants Allison to understand that they could address these philosophical issues together. This conversation would involve a fair amount of kissing. And more.